How are the best university lectures designed?
I recently served on a postdoctoral teaching fellow review committee as a student leader at my school. My responsibilities included reviewing lots of syllabi, course proposals, and lecture videos made by postdocs.
As I watched videos one after another, I noticed that a few of the candidates stood out more than others. I made notes on what they did to keep me engaged the entire time.
Here are some of my take-aways and thoughts on how instructors can make lectures more effective and engaging from an undergrad student’s perspective.
1. Frame each lecture like a story.
The learning journey should feel fun and exciting, like an adventure. Take us on a journey of learning filled with brief moments of struggle and discovery. Use Three-Act Structure or Freytag’s Pyramid to structure the story arc of lectures.
2. Use the Gap Theory of Curiosity in every lecture.
Start each lecture by opening our gaps in knowledge. Pose questions. Make us hungry to learn, pay attention, and get the answer. By the end of the lecture, you should have closed this gap of knowledge, and you should have satiated our hunger.
3. Use Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle model to inspire and motivate us to learn.
Tell us: 1) Why this concept matters, 2) How we’ll learn this concept throughout the lecture, and 3) What the concepts are.
Help us understand why what we’re learning is relevant, and then walk us through how we’ll get there.
4. Design each slide like a business pitch deck.
- Use bullet points.
- Use visuals.
- Keep it concise.
- Put extra information in an appendix for later viewing, or put them in the notes section of the slides.
Sell us on the concepts you’re teaching.
5. Limit the amount of information you put on each slide.
Information overload is very real. Our focus should be on you and your words, rather than the slides.
6. Make abstract concepts more concrete by using analogies.
The more concrete something is, the more likely we’ll understand and remember it.
7. Use simple language and short sentences when possible.
Run everything through HemingwayApp and make sure readability is at most 10th grade. We should be focusing on the knowledge and concepts in their most crude form, not on semantics.
8. Bake in stopping points for feedback, reflection, and questions.
It’s the worst when I get confused by a concept and I have to wait until office hours later in the week to clarify my understanding.
9. Recap and summarize the main takeaways at the end.
Memory is like velcro. The educator’s goal is to help the hooks of knowledge get snagged inside the loops in a student’s brain. The more you can reinforce the idea through reiteration, the more likely it will stick with the student.
10. Leave us with something actionable.
What can we do now with this knowledge? List the deliverables, for example, homework, exercises, or real-world application. Put this on the very last slide.
These are just a few suggestions, to begin with. I’d mention that not all will apply to every field, discipline, and course. But, that’s the beauty behind teaching. :) Some methods of teaching are just naturally more conducive to communicating certain topics than others. It’s up to the instructor to determine which tool to use for the right job.
Dear reader, thanks for reading! I hope you found some of this helpful. In this publication, I’ll be exploring the visible and invisible systems of design, technology, and learning in education. I write from a designer, techie, and undergrad business student’s perspective.
– Kaci, an educator at heart 💛
